The hammer's inventor works out the design for his invention's prototype.

WASHINGTON, D. C. - An international team of geeks led by archaeologist Julio Mercader of Canada’s Calgary University has concluded that, in all likelihood, the hammer, once thought to be a human creation, was invented by ancient chimpanzees.

Calgary University, which is struggling to retain its accreditation during rumors that its faculty, Mercader included, might not be up to academic standards on an international scale, dismisses allegations of his and his colleagues’ shaky scholarship. “He has a Ph.D from one of the world’s most prestigious institutions, the Ontario Online University and Diploma Mill,” the university's spokesman, Maynard G. Krebs, pointed out to Unnews' reporter, Lotta Lies. “The allegations of his having plagiarized his thesis are also unfounded. Whatever the topic of his dissertation might have been, he never filched it from anyone else.”

According to Mercader, the chimpanzees used their hammers to crack nuts and the occasional skull. The tools were made of a stick to which a flat-edged stone was bound by vines. “Although primitive by Neanderthal standards, the chimps’ hammer also preceded the Neanderthals' improved model by several thousand years,” Mercader stated.

His expedition also found evidence that ancient chimpanzees may have farmed both peanuts and bananas. In part, their invention of the hammer allowed them to advance from a hunting and gathering economy to an agricultural economy. In turn, the adoption of an agricultural lifestyle allowed the chimpanzees’ art and culture to flower, the archaeologist contends, “and they painted some magnificent murals in the caves of southern France, many of which told a narrative in a serial form, much as do contemporary motion pictures except that, of course, the murals didn’t move.”

Mercader also believes that ancient chimpanzees may have been the first philosophers, priests, and theologians.

Some of his colleagues (outside troubled Calgary University) discount or even dismiss Mercader’s views as “preposterous.” Among his critics is anthropologist Jeanne Sept, of Indiana University. “Mercader dismisses or ignores evidence that does not support his nutty chimp-nut theory,” she charged. “I recommend, therefore, that both he and his views be likewise dismissed or ignored.”

Mercader’s research, such as it is, was funded by the Charles Darwin Foundation For Proving the Simian Origin of Homo Sapiens.